The Man Who Saved the Union Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by H. W. Brands

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin

  are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Photographs courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division and the National Archives and Records Administration.

  Book design by Maria Carella

  Cover design by John Fontana

  Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress

  Endpaper map by John T. Burgoyne

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brands, H. W.

  The man who saved the union : Ulysses Grant in war and peace / H. W. Brands. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  1. Grant, Ulysses S. (Ulysses Simpson), 1822–1885. 2. Presidents—United States—Biography. 3. Generals—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  E672.B8 2012

  355.0092—dc23

  [B] 2011043795

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53242-6

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Proud Walls

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART TWO

  The Rage of Achilles

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  PART THREE

  And Give the Peace

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Illustrations

  Other Books by This Author

  PROLOGUE

  IN A CHAIR ON THE PORCH OF A COTTAGE IN THE MOUNTAINS, AN OLD man sits. The summer sun warms the air, the trees, the cottage, the porch; but the old man wears a wool cap and wraps himself in a blanket and still feels cold. Yet he pushes aside his discomfort, even as he ignores the sharp pain in his throat, to focus on his work. Paper and pencil are his instruments, a lap desk his work space. The task transports him beyond his chill, beyond his pain, across the years. He recounts his life for a public that he cannot see but that is watching him, and has been watching him for the two decades since he became the nation’s hero. He hadn’t intended to write his story; he was willing to let the other officers of the Civil War duel for historical reputation. His own reputation was secure: he had commanded the army that defeated the rebellion and held the Union together. Not even Lincoln ranked higher in popular esteem at the moment of victory, and Lincoln was murdered within the week of Appomattox. Other Union ­generals—Sherman, Sheridan, Meade—had their partisans, including the thousands of soldiers who had served under them. He didn’t begrudge them their laurels, nor did he seek any for himself. The laurels came to him unsought.

  He had always had a gift for conjuring images in his mind’s eye; it was one of the secrets of his military success. He could visualize a battlefield and perceive where the enemy’s weaknesses were and how to exploit them, where his own weaknesses were and how to remedy them. He can visualize his battlefields even now: Fort Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Richmond. He can hear the whistle of the artillery shells, feel their concussion as they exploded, smell the burned powder and the sweat of horses and men.

  Most of all he can summon the secret blessing of war: the liberating clarity of purpose felt by those who thrive amid war’s chaos. He remembers his first taste of battle, in Mexico after his graduation from West Point. He had been frightened on approaching the enemy but discovered that he never functioned better than when under fire. Others became rattled and confused; he grew calm and focused. The end of the Mexican War left him at a loss; he fumbled through the following decade disappointing himself and those who knew him. He was resigned to mediocrity when another war, the great war for the Union, rescued him.

  He doesn’t write so swiftly now as he did when issuing dozens of orders a day. He fell out of the physical habit of writing during his eight years as president, when secretaries took his dictation. That was almost the only advantage life in politics had over life in the military. The business of the military is war, and war is simple and straightforward. In war the objective is plain and the measure of success undeniable. Your side wins or it loses; you live or you die. War is brutal, but its brutality allows differences of opinion to be resolved definitively. In politics things are never so straightforward. In politics differences of opinion are rarely resolved and almost never definitively; in politics the best outcomes are typically compromises that leave all parties grumbling. In politics the ignorant and venal have as much right to their votes as the educated and upstanding.

  Of the ignorant and venal he encountered plenty as president. But his problem with politics ran deeper than that, for even good men could differ on solutions to the troubles that vexed America in the wake of the Civil War. He often felt as though he was the last elected official who cared about the freedmen, such criticism did he receive from both parties for the strong measures he took to defend the former slaves against the Ku Klux Klan and kindred tormentors. He felt likewise lonely trying to secure belated fair treatment for the Indians. He could claim only modest and passing success in these endeavors, not because bad men defeated him but because good men, wea
ry of the strife of sectional crisis, war and reconstruction, found other things to worry about.

  Yet his efforts weren’t wasted. By the time he left office the Union was secure, which was something that could not have been said during most of his sixty-three years of life. The nation was at peace, after a war that had killed six hundred thousand. Democracy survived, for all its flaws and frustrations.

  His parents had named him for Homer’s hero of war and wandering, and as his journey nears its end he marvels at what a strange trip it has been. “I never thought of acquiring rank in the profession I was educated for,” he jots in a journal he keeps to record the final miles. “Yet it came with two grades higher prefixed to the rank of General officer for me. I certainly never had either ambition or taste for a political life; yet I was twice President of the United States.”

  The remaining challenge of the journey is to finish his tale. “I must try to get some soft pencils,” he writes as the light fades and his scratchings grow harder to read. “I could then write plainer and more rapidly.” His son is helping. “Buck has brought up the last of the first volume in print. In two weeks if they work hard they can have the second volume copied ready to go to the printer.” If he can hold out that long, he will be able to rest. “I will then feel that my work is done.”

  PART ONE

  PROUD WALLS

  “Ye kings and warriors! may your vows be crowned,

  And Troy’s proud walls lie level with the ground.”

  1

  THE JOURNEY BEGAN GENERATIONS BEFORE HE WAS BORN. His ancestor Mathew Grant crossed the Atlantic from England with the Puritans in the 1630s, and subsequent Grants migrated progressively west: to Connecticut in the seventeenth century, Pennsylvania in the eighteenth, Ohio in the nineteenth. Jesse Grant, of the sixth generation of American Grants, for a time lived in Deerfield, Ohio, with a family named Brown, of whom a son, John, would attempt to start a slave revolt at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859.

  Jesse Grant never got much formal education and always felt the lack; he vowed that his sons would not suffer similarly. Jesse married Hannah Simpson in 1821; ten months later, on April 27, 1822, Hannah bore a son they named Hiram Ulysses on the partial inspiration of an aunt with a penchant for the classics. The boy attended private schools, since public education hadn’t reached Georgetown, in southwestern Ohio, where he grew up. At fourteen he was sent across the Ohio River to Maysville, Kentucky, to boarding school, but the experience didn’t take and he returned to Georgetown. At sixteen he enrolled in an academy in Ripley, on the Ohio bank of the Ohio River, with no greater success. He later acknowledged that the failure was his own fault. “I was not studious in habit,” he said, “and probably did not make progress enough to compensate for the outlay for board and tuition.”

  Yet he was no rebel. “He was always a steady, serious sort of boy, who took everything in earnest,” his mother recalled. “Even when he played he made a business of it.” For this reason his parents paid attention when he registered his preferences and dislikes. Jesse owned and operated a tannery, in which Ulys, as family and friends called the boy, was expected to work. But he detested the place and what went on there. “He would rather do anything else under the sun than work in the tannery,” Jesse recounted. Jesse remembered informing Ulys a few times that he would have to grind bark (for the tannic acid it contained). “He would get right up without saying a word and start straight for the village, and get a load to haul, or passengers to carry, or something another to do, and hire a boy to come back and grind the bark.” Other aspects of tanning were equally distasteful. In the “beam room” hides were defleshed by being drawn forcefully over beams; Ulys entered only under paternal duress and told his father that as soon as he could support himself he would never go near the smelly place again. Jesse excused him. “I don’t want you to work at it now if you don’t like it and mean to stick to it,” Jesse recalled saying.

  So he let the boy work outdoors. Ulys loved horses and early displayed a gift for riding and managing them. “He had the habit of riding our horses to water, standing up on their bare backs,” Jesse remembered. “He began this practice at about five years old. At eight or nine he would ride them at the top of their speed, he standing upon one foot and balancing himself by the bridle reins.” Ulys drove the team that transported wood and other supplies for the tannery; from the age of eleven, when he was big enough to handle a plow, he took charge of all the horse-powered tasks on the family farm.

  He impressed his father with his self-sufficiency, and Jesse let the boy travel by horse and wagon around southwestern Ohio and into Kentucky. The journeys often involved some aspect of the family business: purchasing supplies, delivering messages or finished products. Ulys especially liked to buy horses and felt much older than his years when he made a good bargain.

  Sometimes the bargains weren’t so good. A neighbor had a colt that Ulys, then eight, fancied; the neighbor asked twenty-five dollars for it. Jesse didn’t want to spend more than twenty, but Ulys pleaded and persuaded his father to let him offer more if necessary. As the story was later told, the boy approached the neighbor: “Papa says I may offer you twenty dollars for the colt, but if you won’t take that, I am to offer twenty-two and a half, and if you won’t take that, to give you twenty-five.” The neighbor laughed and received his full price.

  Grant remembered the incident sixty years later, not fondly. “This transaction caused me great heart-burning,” he said. “The story got out among the boys of the village, and it was a long time before I heard the end of it. Boys enjoy the misery of their companions, at least village boys in that day did, and in later life I have found that all adults are not free from the peculiarity.”

  In his eighteenth year Ulysses looked forward to leaving school, but Jesse had other plans. An acquaintance and former friend, Thomas Hamer, represented Georgetown’s district in Congress; the friendship had foundered in the breakup of the old Republican party of Thomas Jefferson and the emergence of the Democratic and Whig parties. The Democrats favored Andrew Jackson and opposed the Bank of the United States, while the Whigs backed Henry Clay and supported the national bank. Thomas Hamer was a Jackson man, Jesse Grant a Clay man, and sharp political words led to a personal rupture.

  Yet Jesse needed Hamer’s help six years later when he learned that a West Point cadet from the district had to withdraw from the military academy. Jesse wanted Ulysses to receive the nomination in the young man’s place. He approached Ohio senator Thomas Morris but was informed that Hamer held the right of appointment. Jesse suspended his hostility toward Hamer long enough to ask him to nominate Ulysses.

  Hamer was willing to move beyond their differences; moreover, with the nomination deadline swiftly approaching, he had no other nominee. He put Ulysses forward.

  Only at this point did Jesse apprise his son of what he had been doing on his behalf. “Ulysses, I believe you are going to receive the appointment,” he said. “What appointment?” Ulysses asked. “West Point,” Jesse answered.

  Ulysses was less grateful than Jesse thought fitting. The young man didn’t know much about the military academy, but what he thought he knew disposed him against it. “I had a very exalted idea of the aquirements necessary to get through,” he recalled later. “I did not believe I possessed them, and could not bear the idea of failing.”

  One thing alone, the prospect of a journey, made the appointment appealing. “I had always a great desire to travel,” he explained. He had ventured as far as a horse could conveniently take him from Georgetown, and the prospect of crossing the eastern mountains was alluring. “Going to West Point would give me the opportunity of visiting the two great cities of the continent, Philadelphia and New York.” His curiosity overcame his fear and he agreed to go.

  Yet even as he imagined what he would see in the big cities, he secretly hoped fate would spare him from actually becoming a cadet. “When these places were visited,” he recalled, “I would have been glad to have had a ste
amboat or railroad collision, or any other accident happen, by which I might have received a temporary injury sufficient to make me ineligible, for a time, to enter the Academy.”

  The journey was everything he hoped for, save the accident. Steamboats had arrived on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers about the time Grant was born; by 1839 they had transformed the economy of America’s central valley, permitting travelers and cargoes to move upriver almost as easily as down. Grant boarded a steamboat at Ripley and rode three days to Pittsburgh. Many travelers on the Ohio in that period remarked the difference in development between the thriving Ohio side of the river, where free farmers tilled the fields and free workers manned the wharves, and the languishing Kentucky and Virginia side, where slaves, with no stake in their labors, did the toiling. If the young Grant noticed the difference, he didn’t record it.

  At Pittsburgh he switched to a canal boat. Canals had served the American East since the eighteenth century; during the first third of the nineteenth century they penetrated the interior, with the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes and launching New York City to commercial primacy. The narrow-beamed canal boats, pulled by horses or mules on canal-side towpaths, were slow but sure. “No mode of conveyance could be more pleasant, when time was not an object,” Grant wrote of his own trip. His vessel was comfortable, and the artificial waterway afforded excellent views of the western Pennsylvania landscape. For Grant, the slowness of travel was a mark in the canal’s favor. “I had rather a dread of reaching my destination.”

  At Harrisburg he encountered the revolutionary transport technology of the era. American railroads were younger than Grant, but their effect on locomotion was evident the moment he stepped aboard. “We travelled at least eighteen miles an hour, when at full speed,” he remembered, “and made the whole distance averaging probably as much as twelve miles an hour. This seemed like annihilating space.…I thought the perfection of rapid transit had been reached.”

  He stepped off the train at Philadelphia, which entranced him so much that he spent five days exploring nearly every street and alley, visiting the sites associated with the landmark events of America’s founding, attending the theater and generally acting the young man with pocket money and no desire to leave.